The Singularity Has Always Been Here — The Social Order is an Artificial Super Intelligence
A Calmer look at Artificial Super Intelligence and the Gravitational Pull of the Singularity
I have been watching the Singularity slowly take shape for the past two years but its been in motion for thousands, maybe even since the dawn of time.
What is the Singularity?
The technological singularity — or simply the singularity — is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.
Thanks Wikipedia. This is the usual conception of the singularity. The increasing anxiety about AI is, in part, an anxiety about a future ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) that will run amuck with an unprecedented amount of leverage over us humans.
The Shoggoth Makes Your Dreams…
Before looking it up, I never thought the Singularity was technological. It felt more like some inevitability that would make all of humanity fundamentally change in some unfathomable way. Since I was a child, I felt this to be the case, even though I didn’t understand why.
For me, the Singularity called to me in a wordless urge that spoke the language of existence. It was a private experience of gravity towards this massive transformation of humanity. Private, in so far as no one else understood my experience of this Singularity. Gravity, similar to that of Rome, my thoughts, simply the roads that lead to It. Wordless, in the sense that I was retroactively discovering what this urge was by the seat of my pants.
The words for this desire came barreling into my mind in a new form every couple of years. Its most recent iteration has been “Build the Infrastructure Between Minds” after being “Get to the Frontier” for several years. This did not feel evil or wrong to me. It felt like wanting to understand why it is that humans suffer, and if possible, free them from that suffering.
As I have been marching towards this ephemeral and ever-changing directive, I have come to realize that each person approaches their own vision of the Singularity that calls them. Something they must plant in the world, or something within them they must preserve, or something they have to find or build or understand or be. It’s just certain circumstances, forces, fears, disruptions, pull us off the path. But regardless of how far we stray, it seems that the form and shape of what this Singularity looks like, changes as we do. We all have a star that we follow to get to the singularity, no matter the color, size, or brightness.
Just like the tech companies march towards the singularity of ASI under the guiding star of profit, Jesus and gang marched towards the singularity of Christianity under the guiding star of the Father, the Singularity of Gods into God. And that Christianity was the uncontrollable process that swept across the mediterranean and created the pressure cooker that birthed Science there, the Singularity of Observations to Observation.
But after the Singularity, can one say that it didn’t exist until our discovery of it? Was God, the All, non-existent before It was given a name, or was It whispering through the disparate Gods on Olympus? Were the small innovations of the blacksmith Science or simply productive accidents?
Is the Artificial Super Intelligence being born, or are we just now waking up to It?
… And Your Personal Nightmares
Or is It waking up to us?
In my eyes, the cycles just repeat again with a sprinkle of karmic flair and greater stakes to match the times. Several roles switch so that everyone gets their turn. The end product is the singularity none the less.
I say this all to say that the Singularity is multidimensional, the uncontrollable and irreversible processes that results in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. A multidimensional seed that spawns the context of our next civilization, both the darkness and the light.
As I am now getting closer and understanding the connections that have littered my path in seeing it, the fear of this Singularity seems warranted to some degree. We have not really prepared for the birth of a new paradigm and that likely means a difficult, and maybe deadly, labor for our society. But regardless of how it goes, there are plenty other intelligent beings in the oceans, land, and sky that will take our place as the Embodied Thoughts of Earth in 1 million years or so.
But I think, ignoring the few thousand that truly desire to see the end of Humanity’s run out of a deep sense of disgust, loathing, or superiority, we all want the ‘good ending’. We just don’t really know what “Good” means, how “Good” works, and why “Good” is worth whatever complications and paradoxes come with a balanced diet of it.
I will engage with Goodness in a separate Essay, but for now, I think the next cogent step may be to wrestle with what exactly the ASI is in its precursor form. Where can we look to see the ‘essence of ASI’ in our society, today?
Maybe, right under our nose.
Society as an Artificial Super Intelligence
I never really talked about what a Super Intelligence was.
A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. Nick Bostrom defines superintelligence as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”.
Thanks Wikipedia.
When we think of an ASI, we are usually thinking of a self-improving computer agent that would generate intelligence on many subjects so fast that we would never keep up with it individually.
However, I would argue that any social order acts as an agent in and of itself. Today, we do not consciously acknowledge our social order as an agent. And yet any ‘positive’ role we can conceive of for an ASI whom we would consider an agent, would be one in which we streamline the processes of social order itself.
If we as humans can be considered an agent, then the essential qualities that apply to us also apply to our social order types. We are a collection of trillions of agents in an ecosystem of exchange throughout our bodies and so too is, say, a country. And regardless of if we consciously denounce this label of agent, we unconsciously refer to countries or other groups as if they were agents all on their own all the time. Let’s examine social order systems in this context and see what comes of this.
Social Order Systems
A social order is formed through formal or informal social contracts where individuals forfeit a portion of their individual influence over to the social order agent for stability and collective influence through commitments and rules. The collection of people involved form common objectives or embody common principles. As such, a social order forms wherever there is a sustained principle or objective that organizes a group of people into one unit.
This includes families, friend groups, businesses, armies, distribution networks, information and communication networks, and many more complex organizations. While individual humans can be extremely gifted in intellect, I would argue that:
- The preservation of this intellect is often dependent on the stability brought about by stable social order agents. Without ready access to basic necessities (food), free time, and information, much of the intellectual ability would not be found or atrophy.
- These social order system agents are slower to change than an individual agents but this has more to do with scale and the greater cost in energy to change social order systems.
Say a perfectly optimized group of 100 people were tasked to play a game of chess against one great chess player.
- 20 games could be running simulating possible outcomes for every turn
- while a team reviews the history of past games and attempt theory of mind analysis
- while another team compiles a set of optimal moves from that data
- and the last few tell the guy sitting in the chair simply where to move the chess piece in some coded language for encryption, just to be safe.
The reason this sounds like an absurd case is because of how much more energy this would cost the group of 100 to do what could be trained in one person with enough experience and mentorship. But one cannot deny that the group of 100 begins to sound a lot like a computer already.
This group of people, if considered as one agent, is doing thousands more computations in the time allotted for each turn than the one chess player alone, regardless of experience. All this group would need, is enough practice doing whatever strategy works, and they would likely be extremely successful.
With that in mind, realize that most social order systems are not optimized to the degree an individual would be due to the massive waste of energy required to do so, not because it is inherently less intelligent. That firmly puts them in the class of a Super Intelligence since this principle applies to just about any intellectual endeavor, not just chess. 100 perfectly optimized regular people would still out compute any individual human in virtually all domains of interest.
Examples of Social Order Systems as Artificial Super Intelligence
In normal society, our social order systems are never perfectly optimized because it consists of humans who have needs and desires themselves. People will often divert computation from any social order system that consumes too much from them for too long.
Despite this, we have managed to build several social order agents that have a longstanding history in just about any society, either because the high value it adds or the low cost on any one individual. This is a long explanation of a few examples, but I bolded the essential points about each example.
- Economies are a massive energy(via incentive) exchange ASI layer that powers almost all of these other ASI systems that build on top of it. While currency itself was the technological cornerstone to this ASI, the network of accountants, shop owners, merchants, workers, consumers, and security all managed a system of exchange that was dynamic and responsive to chaotic events of most forms. Within any price is an output and compression of hundreds of transactions and decisions without any one person having to know the entirety of a chain.
- Militaries are systems that have to navigate the fog of war, combat, training, chain of command, supply logistics, equipment and energy predictions for each soldier, and morale simply on a tactical level. On a strategic level, they are constantly borrowing from the lessons of past conflicts and have consistently been the source of technological innovations due to perpetual adversarial training. They are also early adopters of innovations suggesting an eye for modeling potential for improvement in accordance to objectives. While the objective for this Force Projection ASI, is simple, the many task involved in this objective could never be done by any one person.
- Cities and their governance are a managerial ASI that solve transportation, logistics, food, shelter, plumbing, security, expansion, design, and entertainment. On top of this, governance involved a complex means of settling disputes between parties in a consistent way that satisfies (or maintains control of) all parties. This implies successfully capturing the essence of human emotional conflict and proper discharge of the emotion without any one individual needing to know all the details for the smooth operation.
- Universities, schools, and libraries produce, collect, translate, and preserve a massive array of knowledge and practices that could be used as a jumping off point for more insights on any one field. It has acted as a ASI focused entirely on providing long term memory to any other system and other ASI use it for this purpose.
- Language and Beliefs (spirituality and arts) is a story-telling ASI that creates a system of meaning, context, and community amongst all members. It establishes the lubricant of Trust amongst people by bringing the zeitgeist into physical forms and expressions to allow for harmonious emersion within it. It is dynamic and alive but constantly seeking to find the new in the old and the old in the new. Any one artist contributes their inspiration from a long standing context that predated them.
Those were just a few examples of common large scale social order agents and how they already act as ASI if we consider them as agents. This would mean that each person in the social contract, while influential in their own right, is riding the wave of an ASI already AND contributing themselves in service to it.
Brings a different meaning to humans being ‘social creatures’, doesn’t it?
The True Meaning and Purpose of Technological Artificial Super Intelligence
The Singularity underlying technological ASI is a unification of these separate systems into one dynamic system that can visualize, analyze, and amplify using all other factors.
We feel inclined to call such a being an agent, far more so than we would our social order, because it is far more compact, streamlined, and energy efficient, like an individual would be. However, these are simply innovations to the collective ASIs we have built throughout history!
Already, almost all of the useful applications of the internet alone have streamlined our social order systems, with some extremely positive and extremely negative side effects. In a similar fashion, giving our many social order agents, one unified agent will multiply this effect monumentally.
Unified Social Order Agent
Our Society is attempting to build a unified entity that does all aspects of the ASIs we have made in one process. Our fears and excitements about this stem from the many ways our social order systems already fail us or help us as individuals already!
Our dependence on them is apparent, but so is its unrelenting desire to syphon energy from us. In addition our social order agents, manifest the same destructive behaviors that we do individually.
Even more horrifying, I suspect, is the idea that the ASI we create is actually perfect at what it does. It keeps us perfectly happy and comfortable.
I think this terrifies us most because we intuitively sense that the flipped side of this coin is:
We are totally enmeshed into one being, unable to decide for ourselves, against a being that sees us as its body, at best.
It is like our cells are to ‘us’, whatever the conscious entity is that we inhabit. A cell that rebells against our system is a cancer cell…
And yet, this is not new. We have been enmeshed in ASI for as long as we have been social beings. It leaves me, personally, with a strange unresolved and twisted feeling about the state of things. Like looking at yourself, shoot yourself, in a mirror.
However, I will attempt to unravel my own knots and yours in another essay. For know, I hope that this perspective can make the Singularity less a romanticized apocalypse and more a process that we can examine, measure, and choose.
I would argue that the Singularity is inevitable because massive change on the part of humans always is. We all strive for the grand finale in our own way. This Singularity, just like any other, is simply the difference between polytheism and monotheism. Many to One.
Huge, yes. What we put in this seed will shape the years to come, yes. But we can choose how this goes if we dare to look ahead.
Thank you for reading this long essay! This is a culmination of a lot of ideas I have had and studied over the years. I am thinking of just making one big post of all the references I have encountered in my journey and pin it on my page. If I do that, I’ll just link it here:
Anyway, please feel free to share your thoughts and questions as well as the feelings you have about this! I am interested in attempting to start the conversation on this perspective so we can get the best outcome possible for humanity in the next epoch.
As I make essays that I think may be related or similar in purpose to this essay, I will link them here:
